Lamest blog post title ever. I started running my Lean Change Agent workshop in 2014 and have never offered a certification. I provided a Certificate of Completion because I have never believed that anyone should be ‘certified’ in anything for attending a 2-day course.

This is a long post, structured like this and I wrote it mostly for myself, but thought the greater community could benefit:

1. Backstory: My history with certs (to explain how my thinking about certs evolved)
2. Why I created Certified Practitioner and the feedback I got when asking if people were against certs due to the term, or the process of getting them
3. What My Intent was for creating ‘certified practitioner’
4. Big picture of the structure of my digital credential program
5. What I get out of it
6. Details about how my program works (because many will leap to an assumption before knowing how it works)
7. What options I beleive I have based on my intent and goals
8. What I have decided to do after writing this post (in one sitting, no corrections, other than grammarly…a stream of consciousness if you wwill)
9. Reiteration of my intent and goals

Backstory: My history with certifications.

When I received my CSM (Certified Scrum Master), CSP (Certified Scrum Pratitioner, and CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner), I didn’t need to write a test. I was ordained as certified at the end of the class, funny story, we may or may not have certified the workshop hosts’ dog as a CSPO so for a brief point in time a dog, yes a dog, was listed as a CSPO.

When I obtained my CSP, a letter was required to justify your experience. I’m sure there were quotes you needed to validate your expertise, but still, the bar was low. 

Each year you needed to pay $50 or so to keep your certified status, and there was no benefit. I remember asking for help to create a local meetup in the days when there weren’t 90,000 agile meetups every week in every city. I was told to contact my trainer…who did nothing to help.

Coming from an IT background, I had plenty of ‘certifications’ in Microsoft products from SQL Server, to Front Page, to Windows NT, to MS Exchange Server from an, at the time, a well-known training body. I also had my MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) status for building websites with FrontPage 98.

I also had a smattering of hardware certifications from HP and whatever else was required for the IT work I was doing.

Back during my time in IT, MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) was huge, the saying was, “just get your paper, and you’re all set…”

I worked with a few MCSE’s who didn’t understand file sharing.

I have always been vocal against most agile certifications because most, if not all, give a ‘certified’ title after staying awake in a class for 2 days. 

I suppose the last comment about credentials or validation of knowledge is grading systems. I teach an agile methods course part-time at a local college, so I understand how grading schemes and rubrics work and why they are in place. In college, my lab partner had a 4.0 GPA in our electronics engineering program, and he couldn’ put together a basic circuit. I had a lowly 2.06, but I could build anything and knew how to apply the theory and figure shit out.

Why create Certified Practitioner?

I recently published a milestone credential, Certified Practitioner https://leanchange.org/project/lean-change-management-certified-practitioner/, for my organization. Then I asked people if they’re against the word ‘certified‘ or the ‘process‘ in which they are granted (IE: staying awake for two days)

Responses resulted in:

• what makes you an authority?
• some name-calling and snark
• endorsements are better
• most of today’s “pay annually” or “pay for the test” are cash grabs, more or less, that give zero benefits to the earner
• ‘weak’ certifications hurt the industry
• certs are created by salesman to fool clueless managers
• you don’t pay Harvard a fee every two years to say you graduated Harard
• be wary of overstating what the ‘certification’ means
• show me the evidence that digital credentials are used (and followed with “you lose credibility when you claim something and don’t provide evidence” – which is true, but I did the research and I have better things to do than create book report for you. I provided the list of universities that use badges, go google it for yourself if you want the details.
• badges aren’t rewards
• you can’t take responsibility for someone’s future

There were more, but I’ll stop there. I should have expected the polar responses. People are either violently against certs, don’t care either way or are pro-cert.

A minority of people gave helpful insights like:

• I don’t like simple processes that give certs just for attending a class
• I think interviews and validation from an authority is better
• “certificates of completion” are all you can do (which I do now)

I would say the majority of people lept to an assumption, didn’t bother to read anything about what I’m offering, and just decided it was terrible because of the ‘certified’ word.

The Intent

This mostly frustrating exchange with people helped me question why I wanted to do this in the first place so I as annoying as it was, thank you for that. Here are the reasons:

• I have 50 facilitators running my course worldwide, and in some markets, using “certified” language is essential. Some facilitators advertise their workshops with certified language to sell classes, and so far, none of their attendees have griped about getting a certificate of completion
• This isn’t about me anymore. This is about what is important to (A) knowledge seekers, and (B) facilitators who I’m helping with growing their businesses. My business isn’t a startup anymore so it’s not just about what I want
• To provide a more meaningful credential that shows earners have knowledge, have applied that knowledge, and have had the application of their knowledge validated by people affected by the change. The latter is the key difference IMO.
• Show earners multiple paths of learning. Some will go down the “practitioner” path, others the “facilitator” path, and others the “ambassdor” path. Pathways are a concept that comes from using digital credentials, or badges. For example, once people earn a certain badge, the system shows them something else they might be interested in learning about.
• Give small rewards to people who share their stories, teach others, and spread the word about modern change practices.

Big Picture – Digital Credentials

I launched a digital credential program about 18 months ago and have about 1600 earners. The list of credentials are here. https://leanchange.org/credentials/, The evolution of the program, is the creation of 3 categories with easy, medium, and hard levels inspired by Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Knowledge Badges: going to workshops, reading the book etc

Application Badges: using the practices they learned (change canvases, lean coffees etc)

Ambassador Badges: spreading the ideas at conferences, running meetups, facilitating workshops etc.

Milestone Badges: a collection of various badges, the first one is the “Certified Practitioner.” There are some private facilitator milestone badges as well like “20th workshop” and other vanity metrics…the counter-balance is the public rating and review system I use.

Before you bitch about getting a badge for reading a book, it’s one easy badge to get and it’s a thank you from me that you took the time to read it. Some people like a personal thank you from me, most don’t care either way but I’m Canadian dammit so I want to thank people for their time and effort looking at my work.

What I get out of it

Free marketing, validation that micro-credentials help people find new learning opportunities, knowing that, like it or not, some people value a credential as a status symbol.

How Mine work – Details

• there is no fee to get any badge
• there is no fee to get a certificate of completion
• there are no monetary rewards for any of my bagdes (community members get discounts on virutal courses, course attendees get 3 months free in the paid community.)
• my backend generates course ratings for facilitators automatically so some milestone badges are for running X number of courses and maintaing Y rating (there is no financial or other benefit other than the status of being a ‘gold’ facilitator
• course attendees, and anyone for that matter, can join a paid, members-only community as an option
• you don’t have to go to a workshop to get an application badge (you DO for Certified Practioner)
• some are easy to get, some are hard, there is plenty of choice for doing side-missions
• they don’t expire
• for now, I decide on the highest-level badges because I wrote the book, created the course, and have been using these ideas for over a decade
• the evidence of application badges doesn’t have to be a 100% success story because we know all case studies have a certain level of bullshit in them
• getting confirmation and having interviews with people affected by the change is the counter-balance to getting multiple perspectives about what the earner has done (again, doesn’t need to be a rousing success story, just evidence the practice was done, why it was done, and how it turned out from multiple perspectives)
• earners are thanked and rewarded on social channels, they can collect badges in a backpack (I use the Open Badge Standard) and they can add them to linked in etc.
• I do offer IC Agile’s ICP-CAT “certification course,” but that badge is still one of the lowest in my ecosystem of credentials.

What Options Exist?

• online test to validate knowledge (this is pointless, google knows everything so there’s less of a need to store things in your brain)
• using ‘contact hours’ like how PDU’s/CDU’s work (easily gameable by just going to meetups, or signing up for meetups and not going but showing your provider your ticket as proof
• nothing (a stupid option when you’re running a global learning business, but an option none-the-less)
• remove the ‘certification’ language
• provide Linked In endorsements for the highest level badges (my ego likes this very much, I’m sure some earner would like this, but I’m sure plenty of people would be outraged that I have the audacity to this.)
• open up “certifying authority” to the community (that is let experienced practitioners vote and decide if someone has earned higher level credentials. Of course then people will complain “what gives THEM the right to judge…blah blah blah” some people really need to get off social media and start living their lives.
• follow a similar structure to how I am forced to go grades at the college level
• get my association accredited as a college/university/learning institution

What I’ve Decided

• I will stop using ‘certified’ language because if I’m being honest, part of dong that was to make the program more attractive but it really doens’ tmatter. I had someone tell me they’d never come to my course becauyse I don’t “certify” people. I told them good luck in their future endevours, you’re aren’t someone who’d enjoy this course if that’s your stance.
•  I will relabel “Certified Practitioner” as “Practitioner” or “Validated Practitioner”, probably the former.
• I may add levels of Practitioners down the road
• I’ll continue to add more knowledge, application, and ambassador badges
• I’ll incorporate other credentials into my badges (IE: A Lean Change Coach will be someone who earned the Practitioner Badge and also holds a reputable coaching credential like ORSC, or Co-Active
• Eventually, I’ll moonwalk out of the process and make it community-driven through endorsements, possibly panels, or other ways to verify knowledge and practise.
• I’ll give advanced credential earners an endorsement on Linked In, if they want it

Overall, my goal is not volume or a period scheme. If it were, I’d be retired by now. To re-iterate, my goals are:

• give small status rewards, and small benefits (early access to new content/books, discount on virtual training etc) to people who invest time in learning about, applying and adapting/evolving my ideas
• allow me to market my business
• give my facilitators more benefits that help them grow their businesses
• show earners learning options

If my intent and goals are still not good enough for you, please don’t bother leaving a comment if you just want to complain.

If you have constructive advice, better options, or feedback, by all means, leave a comment. 

The conversations and social media interactions did help me question my intent and helped me clarify what my goals are. Now I’ve decided on a way forward and much like everything else in my business that had evolved since 2012 when the first book came out; it’ll continue to evolve based on what my learners and facilitators find valuable. 

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I can’t say I’d disagree, but I thought it would be interesting to see which of my posts were the most popular.

Top 4 in 2018

Simple Exercise to Demonstrate Value of Collaboration

4657 Views

Insights vs MBTI: Am I an Extrovert?

3670 views

How to Hire an Agile Coach

2194 views

4 Steps to an Agile Transformation

1532 Views

The post Agile in 2018 appeared first on Jason Little.

It’s a bit hard to answer this in a tweet, or even a serious of tweets, so here goes.

How this Post is Constructed

• Context: it’s important to understand what triggered me to move away from agile, and into org change. It’s also important to understand what influenced thinking about org change differently.
• Some stats: how LCM came to be what it is today.
• What people who attend want, and what they’ve taken away
• What my lessons have been after traveling the world and delivering over 50 of these workshops

First, How Lean Change Agent Came to Be

About a decade ago I was an innocent bystander in a screaming match between our ‘senior’ agile coach and a senior manager. F-bombs and all. This was my first enterprise agile gig so I figured yelling and swearing at the client and acting like you’re smarter than everybody else in the company was what agile coaching was all about.

While at that gig, another more reasonable coach suggested I go to AYE. I did, and then I wrote this post. Then I created one of the first Live Lessons for Safari Books and InformIT (which is now Front Row Agile) about Agile Transformation.

Then I worked for the organization that the book is based on, wrote the first version in 2012 chapter by chapter on LeanPub and then re-wrote it for Happy Melly Express in 2014.

Torsten Scheller funded the book IndieGogo project, which meant he had the chance to organize the first workshop (which didn’t exist at the time). He brought me to Munich and after 2 workshops, asked if I’d consider licensing the content for other facilitators.

That’s the reader’s digest of my life from 2008 to 2014. The workshop developed over time by practicing what I preach. I used a big-visible wall, perfection game, and net promotor scores after each block of content to see what worked and what didn’t:

Attendees were asked to rate the content block from 0 to 10, with a comment why they gave it that rating. One person in Hamburg gave the workshop 2 ratings. She said for her (someone with a decade of experience in change, and formal OD or professional coaching training), it was a 4/10. For anyone else, a 9/10. (The sticky note is around here somewhere)

Additionally, I used an actions and insights wall for each content block so attendees could track their lessons throughout the 2-days to eventually come away with their one action they’d try.

Next, Some Stats

What started with the intent of telling a great story, spawned a global movement:

• ~10,000 copies of Lean Change Management have been sold factoring in all distribution channels
• peaked at #6444 out of 8,000,000 books on Amazon, #198 in Leadership and Management
• LCM is available in German and soon to be available in French, Spanish and Chinese!
• ~2000+ people have attended workshops worldwide, mostly change consultants, coaches, agile coaches and mid-level managers/directors. Execs only attend if it’s a small company because this workshop isn’t an executive workshop.
• There are 42 facilitators delivering workshops worldwide
• 4.5/5.0 rating based on 37 reviews on Amazon.com (4.0/5.0 on Amazon.ca and 5.0/5.0 on Amazon.de)
• 4.04/5.0 rating based on 175 reviews, and 25 full-text reviews on Goodreads
• 63% increase in my ego
• 2500+ mailing list subscribers
• too many speaking events to count
• A bunch of LCM dedicated Meetup.com groups
• The inclusion of Lean Change Management in Harrisburg University’s change course

What People Want

At every workshop, I ask people to write down their change challenge:

I have 3 years of this data and these are the 2 main patterns:

• how do I get <those people> to do the change (or how do I overcome resistance, or motivate or engage people, or influence people, or something else related to our perception of how other people are reacting to the change)
• how do we use agile, lean startup, and lean tools in change management? (or other questions related to “what the Lean Change Management Framework” is about – BTW, I don’t call it a framework, method, tool, but just called it a ‘model’ in order to make it a thing. In reality, any model/method/framework/tool anyone has created is a documented and visual representation of how they see the world and how they work. I called it “the way Jason works“, it’s harder to sell and people need to know a collection of ideas is a ‘thing’ so there is social proof that there is something to those ideas.

There are a smattering of others, but generally, the change challenges centre around these topics.

What People Takeaway

First I’ll show who usually comes, and then what they’re takeaways generally are.

This workshop has generally attracted:

• Early Adopter, “Traditional” change people who know a lot about traditional change models (Kotter, Prosci are the most common) but very little about agile. This group generally shares the same mindset and mantra that “left-side agile manifesto” thinkers do and they’re wanting to bridge what they know and believe with lean and agile stuff.
• Agile Coaches who know a lot about agile (old world agile…as in values, principles, mindset…not the glut of agile processes that have evolved over the last decade) and very little about organiatioal change, or change management. This group believes in the purpose of LCM but desire some OD structure, models and ideas to be able to coach in the organizational layer.
• Managers/Directors/Employees: This group usually want an answer to a specific question like “how do I sell <this change> to my boss?”
• Reactionary “Traditional” change people: This group is similar to the first one I listed but they’ve been thrown into an agile, or digital transformation and have no idea what that is, or what to do. They might be given a title of ‘agile consultant’, or ‘agile change coach’ or something like that, but basically they’ve been thrown into the deep end of the pool and see this workshop as a lifeline.

Main takeaways:

• change has never been, and will never be a linear process, but that’s scary when you really think about it
• what you do as a change agent is the same, but how you do it if you’re applying agile/lean thinking is drastically different. (IE: change readiness assessments are always a good idea, but there is an infinite number of ways to facilitate meaningful conversations instead of using a 5-question survey)
• people without professional coaching backgrounds see how the tools in LCM help them do what coaches do (IE: storytelling canvases, change canvases, perspective mapping etc). Most take what they worked on in the workshop back to their organization
• most people take away a simplified, non-mumbo-jumbo way of explaining organizational change and change management (IE: putting a question like “what is the urgency to change?” on a canvas or in a survey is just about the dumbest thing you can do…normal people don’t talk, or think that way.)
• change always starts from you. Always. If you’re a linear, fixed-mindset thinker (which there is nothing wrong with, despite what you hear coming out of the agile community), you will really struggle with this concept but if you’re passionate about change, you’ll figure it out. (IE: if you make change about governance and process, that influences your change to follow that same path and it’s unlikely anything meaningful will come out of the change)
• people don’t resist change, they don’t even resist being changed….sometimes they think the change is just stupid so the takeaway is to always involve the people affected by the change into the design of it. Always. Jill Forbes said it best, “the people who write the plan, don’t fight the plan“
• Find catalysts who are in the ‘inner circle’. I call these Movers. As the change agent, your influence is limited unless you enlist the people who have strong relationships throughout the organization.
• Change resistance and the “70% of changes fail stat” are both nonsense and useless to talk about because neither help you move forward, they anchor you.

Perhaps most important, experienced change agents who share a similar belief as I get more out of my facilitation style and the stories I tell. That is, they know I am there to help them, challenge them when I need to, pull back when necessary, and they know the workshop is about them, and not me. They usually take that back to their organizations because sometimes we feel forced into push-based change because of the pressure from change sponsors and stakeholders.

Lastly, the small minority who don’t like the workshop (our average global rating from 1000+ online evaluations is 9.01/10.0) don’t like it because they aren’t given a set of instructions for when and how to use which tool, or an overall framework diagram. They are confused about how to start with LCM because in their world, they have to ask permission to use a “different method”, they usually have to present how it works, and they have a lot of baggage to unpack from previous experience, best-practice thinking and more.

Here are a few pictures of Insights people have had:

My Lessons

• wherever you live, whatever your company does, the problems are all exactly the same: people. Process can’t fix that.
• most change agents *instinctively know* how to do what they learn in the workshop, but now they have a global community and social proof that backs up what they believe, and it inspires them to take action. I try to do lean coffee sessions with previous attendees in my workshops so they can tell stories about what they tried after attending.
• most change agents are coming from a place of curiousity for how to better facilitate change
• There is a chasm of difference between North America and the rest of the world when it comes to a stance toward change management. North Americans are more likely to desire certifications, standards, best practices, and process, while outside of North America, people are more likely to want to find one small nugget to takeaway. Generally they are there to learn how to move change forward with clients or their organization versus improving their marketability as a change manager. Europeans generally engage more as well. If they don’t understand, or even agree, they speak up. North Americans generally smile, nod and give you a bad review.
• certification collectors do not enjoy the workshop (and generally don’t come after learning I do not certify people when they ask for PDU’s or other things.) – BTW, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think we all know ‘certifying people’ after a 1 to 5 day workshop is just ridiculous, especially in change, agile and leadership. Intersting enough, I see some people calling themselves Certified Lean Change Agents.
• Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me is that change in our organizations follows the same patterns as societal change.  It doesn’t matter what method, model, or framework you use, if you don’t know how to navigate the whitespace in the organization, find catalysts, and make use of informal influence networks, the change you’re working on will lead to superficial results at best.
• Ok, another big takeaway: there are thousands of people around the world who align with the stance of LCM and have created similar tools, and have had similar ideas. It’s that community I want to enable.

Jon, this is probably more detail than you were expecting, so hopefully, you (and other readers!) stuck with this post until the end. I wrote it in one sitting, didn’t read it, or change anything so everything just poured out. Hope it was useful!

The post Lean Change Management – 4 Years Later appeared first on Jason Little.

Does anyone remember when Agile Readiness Assessments were all the rage in 2008/2009? Then we realized change readiness assessments have existed for decades and we moved on. Oh, plus change management is boring as hell so we lost our enthusiasm for it.

Remember when Teal was all the rage a couple of years ago? That fad died quickly once people realized spiral dynamics was a painfully deep topic that has been around since the 1960’s.

Remember the ‘being vs doing’ debates? That’s run its course as well, except for the late agile adopters who are just re-discovering what us old dogs went through a decade ago.

Cynefin had a bit of blip on the fad radar, but once we realized it’s quite hard, we moved onto the next shiny thing.

There are too many other fads to list, but now we’re smack dab in the middle of thinking we need to redefine leadership because Agile requires different leadership.

Here’s the thing, take what we agile practitioners say with a grain of salt. Many of us get bored easily, are curious by nature and constantly fidget with new (to us) ideas in order to keep our brains happy. That’s why most of us are unemployable. We’re roamers, explorers, and could rarely, or never, be the 3, 5 or 10-year employee.

The agile movement started in 2001 with the Agile Manifesto, but it might shock some people by learning that business existed before 2001 and many organizations thrived before 2001, thrive today, and will continue to thrive long after Agile is dead. Oh, some believe Agile is dead already but that’s a debate for another day.

We Don’t Need to Redefine Leadership

The main argument in favor of creating agile leadership is because our context is different. We’re in the age of creativity, or knowledge, and people who think of organizations as a machine can’t use the same mental models and practices for leading an agile environment.

Incorrect.

Most leadership ideas that have evolved ever since we crawled out of the swamp specifically show that your leadership style needs to adapt based on your context, and there are plenty of theories of leadership out there but since we agile people didn’t invent them, they’re no good and we need our own.

For those keeping score at home, this is called Not Invented Here syndrome.  We’re all guilty of this because, as my professor at MIT said, “anyone can doodle an organizational structure on the back of a napkin, there is zero skill needed to do that.”

Let’s start with post-industrial revolution leadership ideas:

1) Great-Man Theory:  Leadership comes from within.

In the 1800’s Thomas Carlyle wrote: “The history of the world is the biography of great men“. The idea was, leadership was more or less ingrained in people. The argument against Great Man Theory was that it didn’t factor in society and the environment in which that leader was operating.

Either way, Carlyle hypothesized that internal character, charisma, and attributes are what made leaders great. There is truth to this, but yes, what’s happening around that leader and how they’re responding to that is also important.

2) Trait Leadership:  An extension of Great Man Theory

In the late 1800’s leadership thinkers began to explore Great-Man Theory more and some reinforced that theory stating that the internal qualities of leaders cannot be learned and that they were part of the leader’s personality.

In the 1940’s R.M Stogdill stated that leadership exists between persons in a social situation and that persons who are leaders in one situation may not necessarily be leaders in other situations.

At the time, leadership thinkers thought his statement more or less killed the credibility of Great Man Theory.

In my view, this was the birth of context-driven leadership. I suppose someone has trademarked that too.

Since then, ideas about leadership combined context, social-setting, era and personality traits as being important factors when discussing leadership. Here are some of the more popular ones:

1) 1930: Lewin’s Leadership Styles: http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/lewin_style.htm
2) 1970: Servant Leadership (No, Agile didn’t invent this, Greenleaf did)
3) 1980’s: Situational Leadership (Blanchard) http://situational.com/the-cls-difference/situational-leadership-what-we-do/

A longer list can be found here.

While agile pundits say “but agile needs different leadership!!” consider these stories:

Henry Ford gets credit for inventing the assembly line. He didn’t. Ransom Olds (creator of Oldsmobile) did. Henry Ford simply added a conveyer belt to make it more effective.

At the time (late 1800’s), I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist so it was unlikely that Ransom googled “how to manufacture cars faster”

He experimented, learned, adapted and refined the approach, and made it work.

In the early 1900’s Ford had a turnover problem. Upskilling new people was time-consuming and expensive so Henry Ford started paying workers $5/hour which was unheard of at the time. That created quite a social rift between white and blue collar workers.

There was a catch. He paid them a guaranteed $2.50/hour and appointed a social group to visit workers houses to make sure they were living cleanly. No drinking, gambling, and running a happy home.

Again, I’m pretty sure he didn’t Google “effective HR practices for reducing turnover”

He experimented, and it worked as turnover was dramatically reduced. While that practice probably won’t work today, the method he used to create it is what we’re after. Observe, hypothesize, experiment, measure. Or PDCA.

Obviously, in today’s context a base salary only goes so far, but back then, in that context, it worked.

Great leaders know their context, look around internally and externally, try small experiments, get feedback, inspire others to action, and deal with the shit when it comes raining down. There are countless stories throughout the history of business, before Agile, about great leadership and the context of agile changes absolutely nothing when you boil away the noise us consultants constantly spew.

Here are more examples:

Alan Mulally arguably turned around Ford with a daily standup.

Herb Kelleher of Southwest inspired his team to invent the 10-minute turnaround in the 1970’s when they needed to serve a 4-plane passenger scheduled with 3 planes after they needed to sell one of their planes. Great stories about Herb can be found here, and here.

But Companies are Dying Faster!

Another argument for the need for Agile Leadership is that organizations are dying faster. (insert S&P diagram)

Of course they are! That’s how society evolves. You can say the strongest will survive, or any other cutesy statement, but that’s today’s reality. With our desire to move to a digital, self-serve society, starting a business is easier than it’s ever been and today’s organizations have much less control over their future than they used to.

The birth and death of companies is a naturally occurring phenomenon and you could argue that the death of 1 organization that spawns 20 new ones is actually better for society, and the economy.

We don’t need Agile Leadership, it’s just a way to sell more worthless certifications and for us consultants to make money. That’s it. We don’t need Agile Leadership because to take an idea from famed economist Adam Smith, two things will never change: Competition and Innovation.

As we complete more, we drive up the need for innovation. As we innovate more, we create more competition.

If you must, read Tom Peter’s In Search of Excellence, it was agile and business agility before those phrases existed.

Why So Crusty?

I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m a fan of James Randi. James Randi is a famed skeptic who created the one million dollar paranormal challenge. If someone could scientifically prove paranormal phenomena, he’d give that person a million dollars.

Why? Because people have been ripping off unsuspecting consumers with promises of speaking to their dead parents, or by selling them “super-hydrated water” or other nonsense. The intent is to defend unsuspecting consumers of people who are trying to take advantage of them.

While it probably sounds mean, sometimes we agile people do the same. We promise magic, peddle easy answers, and I’d argue many of us haven’t ever written a line of code, or started an organization, or even managed people in an organization. We just read a bunch of shit that confirms our biases and then proceed to parrot them to the masses. In our session, I asked if anyone had to put someone on the performance improvement plan or fire someone. Two of about 100 hands went up. We never talk about this in agile but I’ve had to do that twice when I had a real job, and it’s not fun.

How would agile leadership have helped me?

The three best (read: worst) arguments I’ve seen to defend agile leadership, and the certifications associated to it, are “just because it’s easy to get, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable” and “everyone’s gotta eat“. The 3rd argument is “I can do more good, and reach more people if I offer a certification because people want them” Wrong. You just suck at marketing and are taking the easy way out.

Viva la capitalism.

What’s the Point?

If you’re a leader in an organization, don’t get distracted by the razzle-dazzle of agile certifications and agile leadership noise. Read this, join a local meetup group, talk to leaders in other companies, share, and listen to stories about leadership and if you care enough, you’ll figure it out. I promise. If you need more concrete ideas and practices, join a reputable leadership association like:

Situational Leaderhip Global Network

MIT Leadership Centre: Our session was based on MIT’s 4-CAPS model that is abstracted enough that I believe the ideas are timeless.

Christopher Avery’s Leadership Gift: I know many who’ve been through it and without a doubt, they are some of the greatest leaders I’ve seen in action.

Global Leadership League

Institute of Coaching

There are many more. None will promise you the quick fix of a two-day certification course, but if you’re serious about upping your skills in leadership, look around, there are plenty of choices if you’re willing to put in the hours.

Great Leadership Books/Articles:

Weology, Peter Aceto

In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters

Getting Naked, Patrick Lencioni (not a ‘leadership’ book per se, but a wonderful story of what leadership looks like)

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith

In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, HBR

Leadership in the Age of Uncertainty, Deborah Ancona

As John Seely Brown said, “The way forward paradoxically is not to look ahead, but to look around“

The post Do We Need ‘Agile’ Leadership? appeared first on Jason Little.

What’s the most interesting about this series of posts is that future coaching engagements in large organizations where quite similar, and while I’m a tad (a lot?) crustier nowadays, there isn’t much I’d change about what I did back then.

At the Toronto Agile Tour last year, I ran a session called ‘How to Hire an Agile Coach‘ and what inspired it was the state of Agile Coaching at the time. I read a Linked In post titled ‘how to pass your agile coach/ScrumMaster interview‘ which filled me with enough metaphorical rage to create this session. It’s bad enough that people who’ve never written a line of code or worked on an agile team are calling themselves agile coaches, but many organizations who are looking for coaches have no idea what to look for, let alone how to interview for one.

The idea of the session was to give people enough information to have a good conversation so they can align with expectations and pick the right coach.

What I realized after reading this series of posts was that there really isn’t all that much of a difference between what a good agile coach does, and a person who’s curious and generally likes helping people solve problems.   

Much like my How to Hire An Agile Coach Session, this series of posts isn’t for agile coaches. It’s for people who think they need a coach to read about what agile coaches do day-in-and-day-out. The patterns that stood out were:

• I had no official ‘manager’ – The senior manager of development signed off on my hours, but that was it.
• I was rarely at my desk – I was always out visiting teams, traveling from office to office doing training, informal chats, lunches and more.
• My work was pull-based – I went with where the demand was.
• I asked teams/people how it was going, what they tried, what help they wanted from me.
• The team(s) came first…always. If we ‘broke a scrum rule’, it was for a reason.
• I had support from my at-the-time mentor – working as a solo agile coach, royally sucks. It’s frustrating, and it’s easy to get into an agile-stick-beating mode which is also known as the fight-or-flight response your brain feels when it seems like no one gets it but you.
• I did what felt natural – ACI’s framework didn’t exist at the time, and the ‘enterprise agile coach’ wasn’t really a thing back then so I had to rely on what felt right in the context of the 4 values and 12 principles.

It was fun to look back at this diary, so here are the posts, in order:

http://www.agilecoach.ca/2009/11/09/a-week-in-the-life-of-a-agile-coach-monday-morning/

http://www.agilecoach.ca/2009/11/10/a-week-in-the-life-of-an-agile-coach-tuesday/

http://www.agilecoach.ca/2009/11/11/a-week-in-the-life-of-an-agile-coach-wednesday/

http://www.agilecoach.ca/2009/11/12/a-week-in-the-life-of-an-agile-coach-thursday/

http://www.agilecoach.ca/2009/11/13/a-week-in-the-life-of-an-agile-coach-friday/

Enjoy!

The post What’s it Like Being an Agile Coach? appeared first on Jason Little.

The post Business Agility over “Doing or Being Agile” appeared first on Jason Little.

If it was My organization…

How do we compare teams?

What estimation technique is the best?

Should we do Agile, or be Agile?

What’s the best way to….?

Do we blame the method or the practitioner if…

If you have an evening to kill, check out any Agile related forum on Linked In. They’re filled with a glut of questions seeking binary answers, and for each question there are 17 coaches and consultants arguing about why their answer is the best answer.  We argue about how stupid people are when they make mistakes, or openly attack people for having a different viewpoint, but I wonder how many coaches and consultants giving advice have actually had a real job and felt what it was like to be stuck working with someone with the dreaded ‘fixed mindset’.

Do these coaches know what it’s like to have to fire someone because your organization can’t make payroll? I do.

Do these coaches know what it’s like, like it or not, to have to fire someone who’s under-performing because their boss is pressuring them? I do.

Do these coaches know what it’s like to sign a big name client with an account manager who’s a complete asshole, and you have to kiss their ass because we need the money? I do.

Like sports, it’s pretty easy to be an arm-chair quarterback, and we’re ALL guilty of it. What if the organization you were hired to coach was YOUR organization? What would you do if you have shareholder responsibilities? Go private? What about when you encountered people with the dreaded ‘fixed mindset’, would you fire them? Would you demand nothing be measured because Deming says you get what you measure?

What about product? Should you just go with the flow and see what happens? Switch verticals when you feel like? Implement Lean? Agile? Scrum? SAFe? LeSS? DaD? Nexus?

What about tools? Standards? Let teams pick? What if you’re regulated (PCI, DSS, Segregation of Duties, SOX etc)? Just use sticky notes and hope the auditors say it’s ok?

What about the managers? Just make them be Agile? Tell them to lead courageously? Tell them to manage the system? What the hell does that mean?

When I was managing a small team a looooong time ago, I wanted to hire an Agile Coach. My boss, the CEO asked me, “how do we know it was worth it?” I told him that I guess our velocity should increase. After all, if we’re hiring someone to help us be more effective, shouldn’t we be faster, or better?

Why else would we spend the money?

I’m glad Linked In forums didn’t exist back then, or I’d have been subject to the beatings I see handed out by expert practitioners. It’s a shame the rational voices get drowned out by trolling of zealots. I can say that because I used to be one. I probably still am to a certain degree, but I’m in therapy for it.

I recently started doing some work with another enterprise organization and just like the others I’ve worked for, there’s no real purpose for Agile yet. Agile is sorta a barrier to entry in today’s software world. Of course, us consultants will say that’s no reason to go Agile! There’s plenty of chaos, plenty of “get lost consultant” attitudes, and of course, there’s some big enterprise framework brewing somewhere that’s going to destroy all the moment we build over the next few months, but oh well, that’s the way it goes sometimes.

This time around, I’m asking myself: “what would I do if this was my organization?”

What I’d like to do: Admit uncertainty. I’d talk to all my direct reports and tell them that everyone is doing Agile, so we need to do it too. I’d want some type of plan, but I’d lead with confidence. I’d make it a priority. I’d personally talk to every coach that was hired. I’d give them some of my time regularly.

What would probably happen: I’d get brought to one of those meetings where the board (or my boss) wants to know where the hell this ‘project augmentation budget’ is going. I’d say it was for process improvement and such, but have nothing to show and eventually, I’d cave and terminate the coaching contracts. After all, challenging the board is a great way to never get a job in this town again so unless I’m prepared to move to a new country, best play it safe.

What I’d like to do: Fire all the managers. Sorry, “the manager” is an endangered species. Grown ups don’t need managers. Human systems have natural hierarchies, not made up ones. Agile SHOULD be #NoManagers in my opinion.

What would probably happen: I’d want managers trained on how to be Agile even though our L&P curriculum is already filled with Danial Pink this, and Ken Blanchard that, and Kurt Lewin something or other.

What I’d like to do: Abolish performance management. Individual performance management doesn’t work. It’s demotivating people! We need intrinsic motivation! We need Agile mindset! We need…more buzzwords!

What would probably happen: Well, I can’t really fire 45 HR people, so I guess we’ll make an Agile performance management plan. Instead of annual carrot/stick reviews, we’ll move to quarterly carrot/stick reviews.

Overall, if it was my organization, and faced with the 3 problems I’ve had in the past, I’d handle them differently today.

1. Can’t make payroll and need to fire someone? I’d say we all take a 5% paycut to keep that person on. That’s the culture I’d want to create.
2. Have to fire someone for under-performing? I’d say no even if it meant losing my job. I’d talk to my boss about finding somewhere for this person to work in the organization…the roles we had him in just wan’t a fit. He was ridiculously smart and stuck in an implementation role.
3. An asshole for a client? I’d back my employee. 5 years ago I’d fire that client. Now I’d take a more rational approach. I’d either coach my employee on how to solve the problem, manage the problem, or cope with the problem. If we need the money, we need the money and most bullies I’ve encountered in business are generally unaware so I’d at least be an ear for my employee.

By the time you read this sentence, about 30 companies would have been created in the US, and just as many would have died. ( http://www.moyak.com/papers/business-startups-entrepreneurs.html ). Whenever I see an Agile discussion that mentions Kodak, or Nokia, or Nortel Networks and how they died because their leadership was too stupid to predict the future, I laugh. There are millions of companies worldwide. Millions! Some like to quote the S&P 500 stat that the average lifespan of the corporation has shrunk to 12-ish years today from 60-some-odd years in the 50’s.  Of course that’s happened! What did you expect? 3 automakers would rule the world forever? Virtual money wouldn’t start to put a dent in big banks? Free wifi wouldn’t destroy big telecom revenue? 47 people wouldn’t invent some GPS devices that prevents my wife from losing her keys every 9 seconds? (they don’t work by the way, she loses her keys every 6 seconds – love you honey!)

Companies are emerging, dying, merging, and being taken over. That’s the natural order of the world of business.

So, given there’s very little chance you, the Agile Coach with zero business training and experience, can be the saviour for an organization, what would you do?

Me? This time, I’m taking a different approach. Help this client find problems, and fix them. That’s it. That might mean helping them find the right JIRA plugin, or sharing some article I found about some dumb technical problem I ran into that they might not have yet. Most importantly, I’ll be explicit about my intentions to annoy the shit out of them every time I hear “we have to” or “they won’t let us” (oh, and I’ve done that already). My job is to help them explore options, but let them chose, it’s their projects, teams and organization.

People don’t want to feel like they’re being fixed. At some point a window is going to open, and as a change agent, sometimes you need to simply be aware enough to jump through it.

The post If It Was My Organization appeared first on Jason Little.

Let’s say the owner had a little more to worry about than ‘being Agile‘.

I remember when the Agile Alliance did their first executive forum at the big annual Agile 20XX conference. I was annoyed. I was annoyed because it was separate from everyone else. My first reaction was, “great, reinforce the problem…” and then the more I moved away from working with teams, and into the management, leadership and organizational layers, I realized these folks had more important things to worry about.

Of course, the counter argument to that is typically “well, they SHOULD care…if THEY are mandating Agile then THEY need to go to Agile conferences and be involved hands-on!!” That makes sense, but it’s not reality.

So where are these executives going to learn about Agile? I talked to a handful of C-level executives from small (100 person) organizations, through to enterprise (30,000+) organizations. I cannot name organizations or names, but this is what I learned.

The short answer, this is where they’re going instead:

• industry trade shows (everything from technology, to industry specific, to product showcases and more)
• shareholder, and board member events
• wine and dines (power lunches, dinners etc)
• visiting executives at other organizations they want to learn from
• going on sales calls/visits (one exec had flown roughly the distance to the moon and back over a number of years.)

The pattern was, “Agile” wasn’t really on their radar. If anything, they learn Agile through storytelling. They’ll visit another organization and talk to their executives, or, they’ll read a case study. The larger the organization, the more likely they’ll read a case study from a big consulting firm. That’s why SAFe, and big frameworks are on the rise. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. One group of executives at a large organization I talked to flew half-way around the world to visit another similar organization to see what their digital/agile transformation was like. They came back inspired, and will most likely copy/paste what they saw, but it’s a start. I encourage my clients to talk to each other, visit each other, and to share stories.

Another executive at a large organization was more blunt with me. He said these were the things keeping him awake at night:

• keeping one eye on old technology migration trends (many enterprise organizations are moving off mainframes which presents an immense challenge not just in product and technology, but business processes, and people dynamics (In other words, those who know mainframes are retiring, or dying (sorry, it’s true), so there won’t be anyone around to run those systems in the near future))
• keeping one eye on the regulation impact of the move to open source (as an example, any regulated organization is on the hook for open source vulnerabilities, where data is stored etc.)
• running damage control on incorrectly reported financial information to the media
• not knowing exactly how his organization would get to the future he, and his peers, had set direction for
• not knowing when, or even if, they’d be able to deal with an organizational problem that could severely harm the long-term viability of the organization
• making sure people were happy and wanted to keep working there despite the next few years of pain they expected to experience while transforming

It astonishes me to see so much information about bad leadership, and how executives don’t care because they can’t spare a day at an Agile conference to explore how to run more effective retrospectives. I don’t think many pundits have a clue how much stress these people have on them, and that executives are people too. Sure, some may behave in a more forward way, which is usually perceived as command-and-control, but from my experience, it’s not the case. They’re just busy.

I worked in a large organization where ‘Agile’ was killed, more or less, because of a financial decision to consolidate contracting vendors. People were told to take a 20% pay cut, move their contract to one centralized firm, or get out. A bunch of people left.

At another organization, one executive had to fire his co-founder because he felt this organization needed different leadership, and there had been years of history he documented in his journal.

I’m not an economist, but another executive tried to describe the impact of commercial credit risk, and how she worries about what happens when analysts incorrect run a story about a rumour that her organizations working capital dips below a certain percentage thus exposing them to risk. I won’t pretend to understand what she said, and I told her that, but the point is, these folks have substantially more important things to think about.  It’s pretty easy to say shareholder value is the root of all evil, but what would you do if you were leading a $100 Billion financial institution that employs 80,000 people globally and is part of an ecosystem that runs the entire world’s economy? I doubt you’d be worried about doing versus being agile.

I talked to an executive who wasn’t happy about his organization’s shift to Agile because, for starters, his budget (he’s on the business side) is paying for IT to learn Agile. He’s also paying for IT’s decision to completely replace the underlying technology, all the while delivering a solution that is at risk. What happens if it doesn’t get delivered? What happens when this executive is labeled as the “guy who can’t deliver” even though he has zero control over it? Our industries aren’t as big as you think, you get labeled as someone who can’t deliver, good luck with your next interview.

I’m sure there are some executives that are going to Agile conferences, I haven’t met any outside of the ‘executives’ who are “C-something-or-other” because they started the company.

One of my favourite books is Weology by Peter Aceto, President and CEO of Tangerine. He describes stories of the need to put on a certain image when you’re a CEO. He tells stories about bringing call centre agents to corporate schmooze events, and what the reaction of his peers is like when he does that. He talks about meeting at the fancy executive clubs, and how people are surprised that he isn’t driving a Ferrari.

These are but a few fantastic stories about what leadership is. I guarantee there are plenty of other executives all over the world that ‘go to the gemba‘, and care deeply for their people. It’s unfortunate the media only magnifies the negative stories.

Don’t assume just because executives aren’t coming to Agile conferences they don’t care. Just because Agile is the most important thing for you as an Agile Coach, doesn’t mean others don’t have equally important things to them. Remember Nokia? Anti-Scrum pundits say Scrum ruined Nokia. Wow, if you really believe that…well, you can imagine what I want to say that I won’t. Ziyad Jawaya, and his management team literally cried at their press conference that announced their sale to Microsoft. Tell me they didn’t care.

Give these gals and guys a break, they’re people caught up in the same system as the rest of us.  Change the system you say? Well, if you know how to move to a money-less, class-less society, where financial responsibility, world markets, and global trade aren’t needed anymore, go for it. I’m sure we won’t have the problems we have today. We’ll just have a different set of problems.

Larry Smith, a professor at U of Waterloo said the only job of the future is creative problem solving. There is only the dance of competition and innovation. Find problems, and fix them.

Isn’t that what we’re being hired to do?

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I’m a softie, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but as time dragged on, I found at least 7 other people in the same situation. Either they were at the same conference, or spoke at a previous one he organized. I’ve also found an organization that paid this person a 5000 EUR sponsorship for a conference he canceled and he did not return their money. So that means he’s been doing this for at least 2 or 3 years. How has word not gotten out?

A friend of mine had also invested money in his conference brand, only to see nothing happen.

No, I’m not mentioning names but the people on this list are authors, and world renowned people in the Agile community.   For them to lose out on travel expenses (some spoke as his conference for free), it’s annoying, but some of these guys can command a lot of money for their time and make that up quickly.  I’m not that popular so missing out on a week’s worth of income, and paying my own travel (5K-ish) leaves me out a substantial chunk of income.  That doesn’t factor in that my workshop grossed around 20,000 EUR for this person (assuming 30 people paid the stupidly awesome early bird rate of 650 EUR which is extremely unlikely).

So what do we do? Launch a class action lawsuit? Chalk it up to a learning experience? This person is still organizing conferences and I am contacting all of the workshop hosts, and speakers to warn them about it. I was willing to give this person the benefit of the doubt when he sent me a 2-page letter at Christmas last year outlining his hardships.

To the organizer in question: Yeah, that sucks dude, but after finding 3 more people who’ve been screwed by you since I received that letter, this situation is beyond your hardships. Your reputation is now destroyed. Many of my friends sent me direct messages on twitter when I posted about this, and they know who you are. I have avoided making your brand and name public, and don’t plan to. Maybe I should, but I know there’s still a reason underneath this and as much as I think you’re a lying, cheating asshole, there’s still a reason behind this. You’ve had many opportunities to do the right thing and I wouldn’t put it past you to collect the registration money for the conference and then cancel it. Considering this years conference is at a different venue, I’m assuming you didn’t pay them either and they won’t have you back.

We’ve offered to help, you didn’t reply.

We’ve sent you numerous emails asking for at least an explanation, you didn’t reply.

You are putting your co-organizers in a bad spot because they are now guilty by association.

What did I learn through all this?

I’m not going to let this experience affect how I do business. I don’t ask for fees upfront like some do. Yes, that’s smart business…and business is business, but I believe in trust first. Naive? Yes, but that’s just me. In some cases I take on the extra work of managing logistics, registrations and more so the money goes into my account, and then I pay the split of revenue to the organizer.

Responsibility

Some will read this and think I’m being mean, some will say I should publicly out this person. Some will say it’s all my fault for some reason or another. I think contacting the people on this year’s program is the right thing to do, and I also think that if you want to know who it is, contact me and I’ll tell you.

If you’re the organizer in question and you’re reading this, sorry dude, but the damage has been done and you can’t save your reputation with me, or the people you screwed.

The post When Clients Don’t Pay appeared first on Jason Little.

Then this year at Agile and Beyond, I had a conversation with someone who self-admittedly is new to the Agile world, more or less. She wanted to know why there is so much fighting between camps. She noticed speakers tend to enforce their beliefs by tearing down the beliefs of others.

The third piece of data that sparked this post was a recent Linked In discussion where a project manager asked a simple question:

This prompted a response you could probably guess without reading any further:

So I chimed in:

To which one of the guilty parties replied:

Hopefully the irony of preaching respect for people while clearly disrespecting the original poster was not lost on this person, and this is someone I know. Sorry dude, I know what your intent was, but this knee-jerk reaction to chastise people new to Agile is rampant.

In the end, the original poster appreciated a few comments from me, and some others:

But, the damage had been done. Shoot first, ask questions later left this person with a bad experience:

Fortunately, other people spoke up about how sad it was to see this exchange:

Hey, I get it, this isn’t the end of the world. Stuff like this happens, and will continue to happen. The best we can do is learn and move on. So when you’re talking to a dumb client, or someone who doesn’t get it, understand where they’re coming from first.

What’s Happened to Agile?

Snarkyness aside, some say Agile has died (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-dead-matthew-kern). Some think it died more than once (https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/05/agile-dead-again).

I don’t disagree with the points raised in either article, but I don’t think Agile has died. After the manifesto was created, those who got it’just did it. They didn’t need frameworks, or methods, they just did it. The organization I was working in at the time was using daily standups, retrospectives and limiting our WIP. We didn’t know Agile was a thing back then, but the way we worked aligned quite closely to the values and principles.

We designed a system of work that suited the type of work, the variability in the work, and how often things changed.

As the Agile movement emerged, people learned, alliances formed, and a little more structure by way of meet ups, other events, and official certification and training happened. As coalescence progressed, the movement started building more momentum, but still within small pockets of early adopters, and those that ‘got it.’

Then the tipping point happened. People realized they could make shitloads of money off the Agile movement which kicked off the era of bureaucratization. I went through my phase of thinking that was wrong, but then I grew up and realized we live in a globally distributed, free market so if people can make money off something, what’s wrong with that?

As the Agile movement progressed into decline in the eyes of the early adopters who ‘got it’, a new Agile movement began. This movement was led by the framework people, and the “agile project management” people, including PMI. Purists groaned, and labeled anyone selling something as a snake-oil salesman, but still, more and more frameworks, and training and certification emerged though co-optation. That means people applied the same set of thinking, and values, to progressing the movement. That’s a sign the movement is in decline and it’ll eventually die when the market becomes over-saturated.

In the city where I live, many people failed over the last 6 – 7 years to build an Agile community, because largely, no one outside of the early adopter crowd gave a shit. Every meet up became the same people talking about the same things. Every conference was the same people talking about the same things. One can only go to a Forming->Norming->Storming->Performing or “Agile Mindset” session so many times before they start throwing up in their mouths a little. Yes, the irony is not lost on me.

Then the industry changed. Well, in my city anyway. The big banks, and insurance companies began going Agile, and voila, a new meet up was born overnight attracting upwards of 150 people without even trying.

Did all of us early adopter practitioners just suck at community building? Of course not. The general population  (or late majority) wasn’t ready yet. This is why you see so many Agile people posting things like:  “BUT I SAID THAT 14 YEARS AGO!!!!! I AM SMARTING THAN EVERYONE!!!!”

Blah.

That’s the way society functions. People don’t care until they need to. Movements emerge, and die constantly. In the 70’s – 90’s big process was all the rage. Then Agile came along and thinned some of them out. As we realized no, or little process, wasn’t helping move people who didn’t get it along, we started adding more complexity to our processes.

Perhaps we’re back at the state where we were in the 90’s and it’s time to thin things out again.

Overlapping Movements

There is a new movement to take Agile back ( https://www.infoq.com/articles/taking-back-agile ). The innovators and early adopters will say “RIGHT ON!!!” but the problem is, the people who don’t get it are already headed down the path of decline in their own movement, namely, the bureaucratization phase of the original Agile movement. If only we could send John Connor back in time to save himself from the original Terminator before Terminator Genysis showed us that it wouldn’t help because John had already sent himself back at a different time that made all 3 original movies completely fucking irrelevant…..uh…never mind.

Call it complexity, call it complex adaptive systems, call it what you want, but realize no one, outside of us consultants, trainers and coaches give two shits about these ideas.They just want to know why their project manager is an asshole, or why their Agile coach is self-righteous jack-ass, or why the author of this post is a raging egomaniac. There, I offended myself too. Are we friends again? Again, the irony is not lost on me.

Another movement emerging is Joshua Kerievsky’s Modern Agile. He spoke about this at Agile and Beyond, and it was a fantastic talk. People like Joshua are people that just get it. These people know how to navigate complex human systems, know how to explain things simply, and will never had a problem building a business that is adaptable. I know hundreds of people like this, many of which who couldn’t spell Aglie let alone build a model around it.

He was quick to point out that the 4 elements of Modern Agile weren’t frameworks, or tools, or methods, but that is precisely what is going to happen over the next number of years IF enough critical mass is created to move that forward. Someone WILL create process models for each of the 4 dimensions. Someone WILL create step-by-step processes, classes, certifications and more about each of the 4 dimensions.  People WILL argue about why my Modern Agile is better than your Modern Agile.

Again, that’s how society works. As people create meaning about the world around them, they create models to explain their beliefs to others. Others take those beliefs and create new models to explain their beliefs to others who don’t get it. Years later you end up with this:

How did 4 simple values, and 12 clear principles evolve into that?

Stuck in the Past

I stopped going to Agile events because over the years I talked with so many people who left completely energized, only to go back into their shitty organization without any idea of what to do next. As the late majority jumps into the original Agile movement, the innovators and early adopters are looking for more advanced ideas, as well as how to redirect the decline of the original Agile movement.

10 years from now, there will be no mention of Agile. Many organizations will have died, many will have adjusted to the disruption in their markets, and new markets will have emerged. There will be new frameworks that help people manage work and people, different camps will continue to attack other camps, and 327 new certifications will be born.

Again, that’s the way society works. People are ready to get Agile, when they are ready to get Agile. I’ve followed collegues into clients who say things like “yeah, our PM is in sprint 1, the team is in sprint 7, and the dev managers are grooming the yak for sprint 2“. It’s unlikely my collegue taught them that, but either way, my job is easier because I’m not the first consultant in! If you get wind of a big consulting firm who’s helping an organizational go Agile, be on the ready. They’ll mess it up entirely, the client will blame them, you’ll be the second (or hopefully third) consultant in there, you’ll say the EXACT SAME THINGS as the previous one or two consulting firms, and the transformation will be a cake walk!

Me? I’m ready to go back to Agile events. I’m sure I’ll still complain from time to time about this mess that is Agile, everyone needs to blow off steam otherwise they’d go insane. The different is, I think I’ve realized my purpose: help people make sense of the ecosystem they find themselves in, and help them think about what options and experiments they can do to be happier. Frameworks, methods, tools, and movements will come and go, but once people realize they always have choice, there’s nothing they can’t accomplish.

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